I wish no one had ever said anything about these
things I say now I'm struggling
to remember James' grandmother
with the eyes like bloody
raw meat perched in the
hospital bed cutlerying her
tray meal with shaking fall
apart hands and all I

can think is "make it
brilliant" in one ear the
old woman in the big empty carcass
of a hospital in the other
the things people will say about
my dismembering of her and
straight ahead

bitter, futile anger for being
dragged along with his life, not mine,
because I'd stepped away
from dying folks and family
and he was so good, so so good,
next to my chasisted
impetuous little girl and I

swell up & up & up & up
with despair, with something, I
inflate and I float away
from him
by his nanna's bedside,
the aura of them blinding.

come back in
the the specific dreary forms
of girls encountered daily
and at night
literally
in my dreams but
it's none so romantic when
the automaton dream-me slips
mole paw hands into their gamy end-of-the-day
skin in a tired facsimile
of sex.

Lord, wake me up
and give me a cup of tea
or a sinus-clearing shot of
vodka.
turn my nightly peep-show
off.

three kids wired up under
their tracksuits I've seen
plenty of tracksuits like
that before and I sniff
and sneer 'it's an approximation
of the type of toughguy
you're like to be' then
they'd prove me stupid
by opening my pretty
soft skin with penknives
or whatever then they'd
be the brutal grunting
beasts while I'd be the
best kind of woman -
wronged and dead. They

never did anything like
that but they did
shout through my car
window "hey, dykes
suck my dick then when I
got out the smallest
one asked me for a
smoke but I didn't give
him one.

Taking an unintentional break from really writing. Haven't written anything for months, or rather I have, but I'm in a holding pattern. I've been through reams of paper but I'm circling. What makes you write, anyway? What makes you say things? I speak in abstraction. Sometimes I write to find out whether someone's reading. I'm doing that now, and it's not good. I often think it's the condition of people my age doing the school-work-future-drink-smoke-party-fun thing to wait for something to happen. I'm waiting. We speak in abstraction. In the meantime, this poem by Kari Edwards says more than I can, so I'll leave it at that.